The horses pushed on with renewed life.  They stumbled weakly, but the hopeless, lack-lustre look was gone from their eyes and at frequent intervals they stretched their quivering nostrils toward the long green line in the distance.  So slow was their laboured pace that at the end of a half-hour Endicott dismounted and walked, hobbling clumsily over the hot rocks and through ankle-deep drifts of dust in his high-heeled boots.  A buzzard rose from the coulee ahead with silent flapping of wings, to be joined a moment later by two more of his evil ilk, and the three wheeled in wide circles above the spot from which they had been frightened.  A bend in the coulee revealed a stagnant poison spring.  A dead horse lay beside it with his head buried to the ears in the slimy water.  Alice glanced at the broken chain of the hobbles that still encircled the horse’s feet.

“It’s the pack-horse!” she cried.  “They have only one horse between them!”

“Yes, he got away in the night.”  Endicott nodded.  “Bat is hunting water, and Tex is waiting.”  He carried water in his hat and dashed it over the heads of the horses, and sponged out their mouths and noses as Tex and Bat had done.  The drooping animals revived wonderfully under the treatment and, with the long green line of scrub timber now plainly in sight, evinced an eagerness for the trail that, since the departure from Antelope Butte, had been entirely wanting.  As the man assisted the girl to mount, he saw that she was crying.

“They’ll come out, all right,” he assured her.  “As soon as we hit the river and I can get a fresh horse, I’m going back.”

“Going back!”

“Going back, of course—­with water.  You do not expect me to leave them?”

“No, I don’t expect you to leave them!  Oh, Winthrop, I—­” her voice choked up and the sentence was never finished.

“Buck up, little girl, an hour will put us at the river,” he swung into the saddle and headed southward, glad of a respite from the galling, scalding torture of walking in high-heeled boots.

Had Endicott combed Montana throughout its length and breadth he could have found no more evil, disreputable character than Long Bill Kearney.  Despised by honest citizens and the renegades of the bad lands, alike, he nevertheless served these latter by furnishing them whiskey and supplies at exorbitant prices.  Also, he bootlegged systematically to the Port Belknap Indians, which fact, while a matter of common knowledge, the Government had never been able to prove.  So Long Bill, making a living ostensibly by maintaining a flat-boat ferry and a few head of mangy cattle, continued to ply his despicable trade.  Even passing cowboys avoided him and Long Bill was left pretty much to his own evil devices.

It was the cabin of this scum of the outland that Endicott and Alice approached after pushing up the river for a mile or more from the point where they had reached it by means of a deep coulee that wound tortuously through the breaks.  Long Bill stood in his doorway and eyed the pair sullenly as they drew rein and climbed stiffly from the saddles.  Alice glanced with disgust into the sallow face with its unkempt, straggling beard, and involuntarily recoiled as her eyes met the leer with which he regarded her as Endicott addressed him: